PHP is for Lucre (II)
I probably should have charged more.
Things I learned in this project:
-
If they tell you the design is important, it doesn't matter that said design includes:
Fixed pixel-height text inputs (so when you resize fonts you can't see what you write)
Misaligned fields and labels
So, I needed to use Smarty to generate the exact same HTML, working just as bad as the original. And it is thrice the work of doing it right.
-
If deployment is on Windows, regardless of having the same version of PHP, you are going to get in trouble one way or another.
In order to do it quick & cheap & good, I used PEAR modules extensively. And now I have to make sure all of them are in the server... where there is no remote admin solution usable. So I have to be onsite to deploy. I can't even remember the last time I had to do such a thing :-(
So, I was cheaper than the other proposals, and maybe I was a bit too cheap. Live and learn :-)
A few years ago I worked doing the site logic for a design studio with some really good designers... But sadly at least one of them was a iMac head with no clue of anything but Photoshop.
I usually had to throw most of their pages away and rewrite the nested tables in a senseful way. When I tried to explain him that tables wasn't a mere tool to layout his mockups. Sadly for me, he told me that HTML was a "programming thing", that is, my problem.
I guess I should asked them for the Photoshop mockup and say they were too moron to do a decent HTML file.
About the PEAR thing, I usually copy the relevant files from my local install into a webserver folder via FTP. Not pretty, but it works, and I use very few modules anyway (MDB2,Date and something more).
That's a good idea, copying into a folder... I may have to do that for some things.
I see you have managed to do all the things that you should have avoided :-)
Sam: You mean programming for money or programming in PHP? ;-) It was decent money, it was a day's work, I just complain too much.